Monument

Thursday — Both waking and sleeping

2010-11-19T00:27:34Z

Woke up quite early, packed up my suitcase, and hacked for a while. Got stuck on the correct (fairly complicated) commandline to pass to qemu; kudos to Ian who woke up, recited it to me, and then fell back asleep again. After that I went downstairs and had breakfast, then caught a taxi to the airport.

The driver asked us whether we wanted to take the toll tunnel, which costs €3. One of the other passengers said yes, but he only had sterling, and was that all right? The driver made the sign of the cross at him.

The plane ride was long, dull, and uneventful, so I spent as much time hacking as my battery and lack of network connection would allow. I took this photo of another plane out of the window, and wrote about clouds. And it was wonderful to be back with Fin, Alex, and Rio, as always.

It's been quite a conference. Thank you once again to all the organisers, and to everyone who made it what it was. Perhaps we'll all see one another in May in San Francisco.

The rest of my conference posts:

Sunday: the flight over, church, setting up
Monday: writing a presentation
Tuesday: giving a presentation, and a brewery trip
Wednesday: clearing up, and free laptops

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Wednesday— In the day and the night

2010-11-17T22:56:08Z

Today was a day of un-conferences, where people attending the conference made up the programme. It was a day of being given notebooks, as you've already heard. And it was a day of packing everything up.

After things were cleared away, some people went to watch the Ireland v Norway match, but we went to a brewpub called Porterhouse for beer and pies.

It's been a memorable and useful few days. Back to Philly tomorrow morning.

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Surprise free laptops

2010-11-17T12:05:24Z

Intel and Nokia have decided to give us all free laptops, as long as we use them to go around and show people MeeGo, and for those of us who are coders, we write lots of cool stuff with them.

Here is the queue to get one:

And here is my new and as yet unnamed laptop, running MeeGo:

I have to say that installation was a piece of cake. Now everyone has three devices attached to the wifi: their ordinary computer, their phone— N900s are almost ubiquitous here— and their new laptop. So I hope this posts!

Oh, I have to mention: the screen on this swivels right round, and is a touchscreen, so you can just tap the screen instead of using the touchpad. It is a very, very shiny thing.

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Tuesday — Be thou my best thought

2010-11-17T10:50:57Z

I think my talk went reasonably well in the end, though there were no questions. I'm not sure whether the audience were entirely satisfied or catatonic with hearing me drone on.

After the talk, I went off and hacked for a bit to clear my head until it was time to go to the brewery; I sat next to Michael Meeks on the way down there, and we talked about office suites.

When we arrived, they had a pretty comprehensive exhibition about how they make Guinness: I wandered around that, reading about hops and barley, until I noticed that people were vanishing upstairs. Well, toucan play at that game, so I followed. My goodness. There was a bar with people walking around handing out pints. There, Will gave me the useful information that Guinness Special Export is much more tasty than the ordinary kind. After a rather large number of pints of that, a rather good U2 cover band appeared, so we all danced. (Thank you for the whiskey, Chani.) I feel surprisingly well today, apart from a slight headache. I suppose Guinness is good for you.

Huge thanks to the organisers, who have certainly shown themselves capable of… no, that line is far too obvious.

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Monday — Be all else but naught

2010-11-16T16:11:02Z

Monday was mostly spent working on my presentation, though I spent quite a bit of time mingling with folk and talking. After hours, Collabora threw a party, and when that party eventually broke up we ended up at a brewpub called Messrs Maguire, who do good beer and good pies. I went back to the hotel and tried to do some more work, but fell asleep.

I also extemporised on some verse by Chesterton.

I am approximately in the centre of this picture, wearing orange with the yellow strap of a bag across my back.

The lights here are shaped like aerofoils, and glide forwards and back in air currents.

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Sunday — Be thou my vision

2010-11-15T02:06:23Z

There are hundreds upon hundreds of fascinating people here at the MeeGo conference. I've been here less than a day and already had useful and memorable conversations. Even when I was waiting at the gate at Philadelphia, two people spotted me, realised I was going to the conference, and came over to talk about tech stuff.

The flight was fairly uneventful, and I slept much of the way. On arrival, we were told it was 34° outside, and I wondered why I'd brought my coat, until I found that US Airways seem to be unfamiliar with Celsius: it's a bit chilly. I took a taxi to the hotel, with a very chatty driver who gave me a brief overview of surviving in Dublin, told me where to find good beer, pointed out landmarks, and passed me a tissue when I sneezed. The hotel didn't have my room ready, so I wandered off.

I soon found myself at St Bartholomew's. A friendly usher (from Leicester, but who had lived in the area for years) welcomed me and told me that they were considered very Anglo-Catholic for the Church of Ireland, but middle-of-the-road by Church of England standards. I think he was mistaken: they would have been considered well within high-church anywhere I've ever been in England. Everyone was friendly, and gave me coffee and biscuits.

Back at the hotel, they were very rushed, with the whole conference taking over the place and then a football match on top of that, and they still didn't have my room. I went to lunch and came back later, and they gave me the key: I went upstairs, took a shower, and fell asleep. After a while Ian turned up, so we explored the hotel for a while, but then he had work to do. Soon after I ran into Rob, Will, Gary, Rodrigo, and others, and we went out for a drink in some random pub near Trinity College, which turned into dinner. And now I'm back at the hotel writing it all up.

I'm really looking forward to tomorrow.

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MeeGo: my part in its conference

2010-10-30T20:40:48Z

I shall be presenting a talk called "Porting existing software to MeeGo" at 15:30 on November 16th in the 1872 Suite at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin. Huge thanks to Collabora for sponsoring me to go, and to Nokia and Intel for organising everything.

Here is the abstract:

Understanding the best ways to design for the screen of a portable device, with unusual widgets and limited space, can be a daunting prospect. In this talk I will discuss the ways in which the user interface of existing software can best be re-conceived under MeeGo. I'll examine the differences between MeeGo's widgets and those of desktop systems, as well as those used under Android, supported by some case studies. Finally, I'll talk about other, non-UI considerations needed in porting.

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